To link to the entire object, paste this link in email, IM or documentTo embed the entire object, paste this HTML in websiteTo link to this page, paste this link in email, IM or documentTo embed this page, paste this HTML in website

News Notes F a l l 2 0 1 1 􀀁􀄠 I s s u e F o r t y - e i g h t C o m p S c i @ C a r o l i n a
Dear Friends,
Fall has arrived in Chapel Hill, and with it, a new crop of graduate and undergraduate students. This summer
was a busy one. In August, we launched a new department web site, just in time for the new school year. If
you haven’t visited the new www.cs.unc.edu, be sure to check it out!
Also in August, we welcomed Assistant Professor Vladimir Jojic to the department. Vladimir is an addition
to our bioinformatics and computational biology research group and an associate member of the Lineberger
Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Unfortunately, this summer we said farewell to our long-time colleague and alumus Greg Welch, who joined
the faculty of the University of Central Florida. He maintains a part-time appointment here, however, and will continue to col-laborate
with faculty and students.
Congratulations to Research Professor and alumna Diane Pozefsky, who was recently named to the Women in Technology In-ternational
Hall of Fame. You can read more about Diane on page 2.
Congratulations also to Professor Steve Pizer, on being recognized as a Fellow of the Medical Image Computing and Computer-
Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Society at this year’s meeting. MICCAI is the premier society in the field of medical image
computing. You can read more about Steve’s honor in the Fall 2010 News & Notes.
This year’s alumni fellowship recipient is Stephen Olivier. You can read more about his research on page 3, and, as promised in
our last issue, you can also learn more about ways you can support the department.
We’d love to have you visit! Please be sure to stop by the department whenever you are
in the area.
For more than two decades, Internet appli-cations
have been relying on the standard
transport protocol TCP (Transmission Con-trol
Protocol) to make best usage of avail-able
network resources. However, even the
state-of-the-art TCP variants now fail to scale
to high enough network speeds to meet the
requirements of the computational science
communities. To address this problem, Asso-ciate
Professor Jasleen Kaur and her research
team have decided to do away with the tra-ditional
TCP framework of operation and
create a novel paradigm that can be scaled to
even Terabit-and-higher speeds.
The standard TCP framework tries to figure
out how fast it can send data by sending some
packets at a particular rate and seeing if those
packets make their way through the network
or not. This probing is done for a time dura-tion
of about the round-trip time (RTT) of
the network path (RTT-scale probing). De-
MAKING HIGH-SPED NETWORKS FASTER
continued on page 2
pending on whether the packets make their
way through or not, TCP scales up or down
the rate at which subsequent packets are sent.
Due to the large RTT-scale used for probing,
even the best of current protocols have trou-ble
achieving several Gigabits-per-second
(Gbps) speeds without the risk of serious
congestion collapse on the network.
Kaur’s approach sheds the legacy RTT-scale
framework and instead designs the packet-scale
congestion control paradigm. This new paradigm
enables the protocol to operate at fine times-cales
and at a frequency close to the frequency
of packet transmissions. The paradigm relies
on two main ideas. The first is fine-scale probing,
which generates finely-controlled inter-pack-et
spacing at the sender and observes changes
in these at the receiver to estimate the cur-rent
available bandwidth in the network. The
second is probing-without-overloading, which
In this issue
1 Making High-Speed
Networks Faster
2 Diane Pozefsky Named
to WITI Hall of Fame
3 How You Can Support
the CS Department
3 Alumni Fellowship
Recipient
4 Department News
5 Alumni News
6 Family Matters
7 Recent Publications
2 News Notes
DIANE POZEFSKY NAMED TO WITI HAL OF FAME
Networks, continued from page 1
exploits the fine-scale of probing to
probe for a wide range of sending rates
within an RTT, without causing persis-tent
queuing at bottleneck links. The
paradigm also helps truly achieve RTT
fairness and friendliness to conventional
TCP traffic — two goals that have so
far remained elusive to high-speed trans-port
protocols.
To test this new paradigm, Kaur is part-nering
with the Renaissance Computing
Institute (RENCI) to use their Breakable
Experimental Network (BEN), a region-al
optical network test bed for experi-ments
with disruptive networking tech-nologies.
BEN can also be connected to
the National Lambda Rail (NLR), the
high-speed research network that con-nects
universities across the U.S. This al-lows
the researchers to use the machines
in the computer science department as
servers and clients and emulate very
long distance network paths by setting
up a path beginning in the networking
lab at UNC, going through BEN to the
NLR through several
cities across the U.S.
and returning to BEN
and to the lab in the CS
department.
Kaur has recently re-ceived
two National
Science Foundation
grants to support the
research on the para-digm.
The focus of
the first grant is on
investigating research
challenges including
the sensitivity of the
paradigm to “noise”
in the end-to-end delays experienced
by packets, the implementation of fine-scaled
inter-packet spacing in current
end-systems, and the stability, sensitiv-ity
and fairness of the paradigm under
highly-aggregated and stressful traffic
conditions. The second grant is for de-veloping
a production-quality ultra-high
speed implementation of the paradigm
on the Linux operating system, and de-
Photo by Mary Lide Parker, College of Arts & Sciences
Research Professor and alumna Diane
Pozefsky has been named to the Wom-en
in Technology International (WITI)
Hall of Fame for 2011.
Diane earned her Ph.D. from UNC
in 1979 and then worked at IBM for
25 years. While at IBM, Diane worked
on the design of networking architec-tures
and their product implementa-tions.
Her 25 patents earned her the
title of IBM Master Inventor in 1996.
When she was named an IBM Fellow
in 1994, there had only been one oth-er
woman previously given the honor.
Her contributions were also recog-nized
by her peers as they elected her
to the IBM Academy of Technology
and to two terms on the Academy’s
governing council.
When she retired from IBM in 2004,
Diane returned to UNC as a faculty
member.
“Since coming back to UNC, Diane
has been most committed to
undergraduate education and
to teaching the computer sci-ence
courses for non-computer
science majors – indeed, for
students scared of technology,”
said Dr. Fred Brooks, Kenan
Professor of Computer Sci-ence
and department founder.
“Equally valuable has been
her teaching our graduate and
undergraduate COMP 523:
Software Engineering Laboratory, to
which she brings experience no one
else on our faculty can touch. I cre-ated
this course based on my own in-dustry
experience. I taught it 22 times;
she does it better.”
Diane’s work with undergraduates has
not gone unnoticed. She has won the
undergraduate teaching award, voted
on by the department’s graduating
seniors, three times, most recently in
May 2011. She was also instrumental
in establishing an internship compo-nent
to the computer science educa-tion
and in getting the combined B.S.-
M.S. program up and running.
Diane is one of five inductees into
the WITI Hall of Fame for 2011. The
WITI Hall of Fame was established
in 1996 by WITI to recognize, honor,
and promote the outstanding contri-butions
women make to the scientific
and technological communities that
improve and evolve our society. WITI
is the leading trade organization for
women in technology.
ploying it on the infrastructure of three
scientific research projects. Prof. Don
Smith is a co-PI on this project. The
targeted infrastructures are those of the
UNC Institute for the Environment,
Carolina Center for Genome Sciences,
and the Los Alamos National Lab.
More information about this research is
available at: http://rapid.web.unc.edu
News Notes83
Stephen Olivier is the recipient of
the 2011-2012 Computer Science
Alumni Fellowship. This fellowship is
awarded annually to a Ph.D. candidate
in his or her final year of study, allow-ing
the student to work full time on
dissertation research. Generous con-tributions
by alumni and friends help
to make this fellowship possible.
Power and speed-of-light limitations
have given us processors that offer
multiple computing cores instead
of a single, but faster, processor.
Hence parallel execution is now the
principal route to increased perfor-mance.
However parallel program-ming
models are still quite rudimen-tary
and oriented toward details of
the parallel processor architectures
rather than addressing parallelism in
a problem-centric framework. Task
parallel programming is a high-level
shared memory programming para-digm
well suited to the construction
of adaptive and recursive algorithms
in scientific computing and other
areas. The computation to be per-formed
is presented in the form of
interdependent tasks created in the
course of program execution in an
input-dependent fashion that often
cannot be analyzed a priori.
Stephen is working with Professor
Jan Prins to develop efficient task
scheduling strategies that balance
load among the processors while pre-serving
locality of reference among
tasks on modern shared memory
systems, with their complex cache
hierarchies and non-uniform memo-ry
access characteristics. A subset of
these strategies is transparent to the
programmer, while others allow the
programmer to express explicit local-ity
constraints to inform the schedul-er.
Working with Alan Porterfield at
RENCI, Stephen has implemented
his task schedulers using the open-source
Qthreads multi-threading li-brary,
distributed by Sandia National
Laboratories, to run full-size task
parallel applications expressed using
the OpenMP standard.
Evaluations demonstrate improve-ment
in parallel speedup on bench-mark
OpenMP task parallel applica-tions
over existing state-of-the-art
schedulers in the Intel and GNU
OpenMP run time systems. Stephen
has also developed performance
analysis techniques to measure run
time overheads, non-local data ac-cess
costs, and load imbalance. His
Unbalanced Tree Search (UTS)
benchmark evaluates the scalability
of dynamic load balancing strategies
on a wide range of parallel systems,
from multi-core machines to clusters
of thousands of processors.
ALUMNI FELO WSHIP RECIPIENT - STEPHEN OLIVIER
With the continued cuts in state
funding, the Department of Com-puter
Science depends on the sup-port
of our alumni and friends today
more than ever. Some of you may
wish to make general gifts to the de-partment
without a designation. To
those of you who select this option,
we say thank you! Others may wish
to designate your gift for a particular
program. If this describes you, there
are a number of ways you can sup-port
the department. Here are four
examples:
1. The Computer Science Alumni
Fellowship is awarded each year to
a Ph.D. candidate in his or her final
year of study. This award allows stu-dents
to work full time on disserta-tion
research. Recipients are selected
based on the quality of their research
and service.
HOW YOU CAN SUPORT THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE!
2. The Stephen F. Weiss Award for
Outstanding Achievement in Com-puter
Science was established in 2010
and is awarded annually to a rising
senior in computer science who has
already demonstrated significant ac-complishments.
3. Enabling technology research is
the passion of professor and alum-nus
Gary Bishop (Ph.D. 1984). Pro-grams
you can support include Maze
Day, an annual free-to-attend event
which brings blind and visually im-paired
children, and their parents
and teachers, to visit the department
for a day of experiencing fun and
educational computer applications
developed especially for them, and
Tar Heel Reader, a web-based collec-tion
of free, easy-to-read, accessible
books on a wide range of topics. You
can find out more about Gary’s re-search
on his web site: http://www.
cs.unc.edu/~gb/
4. The Graduate Student Lounge
needs renovating! It’s the one place
in Sitterson Hall and Brooks Build-ing
where students can escape from
work to play Foosball, watch tele-vision,
or just catch a nap, but it’s
showing signs of wear and tear. The
lounge needs new furniture, game
tables, and so on.
To donate to the department, you
can make checks payable to the UNC
Computer Science Department, and
mail them to:
Department of Computer Science
CB# 3175, Brooks Computer Sci-ence
Building
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175
4 News Notes
DEPARTMENT NEWS
WELCOME
New Faculty
Vladimir Jojic is an assistant profes-sor
doing research in bioinformatics,
computational biology and machine
learning, and an associate member of
the Lineberger Comprehensive Can-cer
Center. He joined the department
in August. Vladimir earned his Ph.D.
in computer science in 2007 from the
University of Toronto. Prior to join-ing
the department, he was a postdoc-toral
researcher at Stanford.
New Staff
Joe Ping-Lin Hsiao joined the de-partment
in May 2011 as a research
engineer working with Russ Taylor
and the CISMM group.
Jodie Turnbull joined the depart-ment
as Student Services Manager in
May 2011. Previously she had served
as the administrative manager in the
Department of Marine Sciences.
Visiting Researchers and Faculty
Wenxi Liu is a Visiting Scholar from
the City University of Hong Kong
visiting Dinesh Manocha from Sep-tember
1 - November 30, 2011.
THANKS AND FAREWELL
Edgar Lobaton, postdoctoral re-searcher
working with Ron Altero-vitz,
left the department in August
2011. He is now an assistant profes-sor
in the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering at North
Carolina State University.
Herman Towles, senior research
associate, left the department in July
2011.
Jur van den Berg, postdoctoral re-searcher
working with the GAMMA
group, left the department in May
2011. He is now an assistant profes-sor
in the School of Computing at
the University of Utah.
Greg Welch (Ph.D. 1996), research
professor, has accepted a joint posi-tion
in the Institute for Simulation
& Training and the Department of
Computer Science at the University
of Central Florida. Greg is maintain-ing
a part-time appointment at UNC
as he continues to collaborate with
faculty and students here. The move
offers a great opportunity to pursue
ideas he has for “physical-virtual re-ality,”
in the context of simulation,
training, and education.
CONGRATULATIONS Faculty and Staff
Jan-Michael Frahm was named an
assistant professor, tenure-track, in
July 2011.
A paper co-authored by Postdoctoral
Researcher Adrian Ilie (Ph.D. 2010)
and Research Professor Greg Welch
(Ph.D. 1996) received second prize
in the Best Paper Awards at ACM/
IEEE International Conference on
Distributed Smart Cameras 2011.
The paper was titled “On-Line Con-trol
of Active Camera Networks for
Computer Vision Tasks.”
Catherine Perry, accounting man-ager,
celebrated 35 years of continu-ous
state service on August 31, 2011.
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
Ketan Mayer-Patel is local arrange-ment
chair for the ACM Multimedia
Systems (MMSys) 2012 conference,
to be held in Chapel Hill on Febru-ary
22-24, 2012.
RECENT SPONSORED
RESEARCH AWARDS
Automatic Quantitative Analysis of
MR Images of the Knee in Osteoar-thritis.
PI: Marc Niethammer. Nation-al
Institute of Arthritis Musculoskel-etal
Skin Disease.
CSR: Small: A Comprehensive Frame-work
for Real-Time Multiprocessor
Synchronization. PI: Jim Anderson,
Co-PI: Sanjoy Baruah. National Sci-ence
Foundation.
EAGER: Automatic Reconstruction
of Typed Input from Compromising
Reflections. PI: Jan-Michael Frahm,
Co-PI: Fabian Monrose. National Sci-ence
Foundation.
Genome Dynamics: Evolution, Orga-nization
and Function. PIs: Wei Wang
and Leonard McMillan. Jackson Lab-oratory.
III: Small: Supporting US-Based Stu-dents
to Attend the 2011 IEEE Inter-national
Conference on Data Mining
(ICDM 2011). PI: Wei Wang. National
Science Foundation.
NSF Support for the 2011 USENIX
Security Symposium, Financial Aid;
August 2011; San Francisco, Calif. PI:
Fabian Monrose. National Science
Foundation.
SDCI NET: Development of an Ul-tra-
high Speed End-to-end Transport
Stack based on the Packet Design Par-adigm.
PI: Jasleen Kaur Sahni, Co-PI:
F. Don Smith. National Science Foun-dation.
SDCI Sec: New Software Platforms
for Supporting Network-wide Detec-tion
of Code Injection Attacks. PI: Fa-bian
Monrose, Co-PI: Montek Singh.
National Science Foundation.
SHB:Small:Computing Robot Motions
for Home Healthcare Assistance. PI:
Ron Alterovitz, Co-PI: Dinesh Mano-cha.
National Science Foundation.
STTR-Interactive Acoustic Simulation
in Urban and Complex Environments.
PIs: Dinesh Manocha, Ming Lin. Im-pulsonic,
Inc.
TC: Small: Server-side Verification of
Client Behavior in Distributed Appli-cations.
PI: Michael Reiter. National
Science Foundation.
Travel Support for Workshop on Mod-eling,
Simulation and Visual Analysis
of Large Crowds. PI: Dinesh Mano-cha.
National Science Foundation.
Women in Bioinformatics Initiative
at ACM BCB 2011 - Conference Sup-port.
PI: Wei Wang. National Science
Foundation.
News Notes65
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Rodger Blair (M.S. 1969) and his
wife, Charlene, retired from their re-spective
jobs at McKesson Corpora-tion
and Shady Side Academy on June
10, 2011. They then packed up their
goods and moved 1900 miles to Las
Cruces, N.M., where they had previ-ously
purchased a home in 2010. Rod-ger
reports that they love it there. He
is currently writing the business plan
for his new business, SofTechMetrics,
LLC, a software process management
consulting company. He says they have
found a great church in their new city,
Sierra Vista Community Church, and
that Charlene will be teaching English
as a Second Language (ESL) at the
church to Spanish-speaking adults.
Rodger is keeping busy with his own
volunteer work as a mentor to two
men: a 29-year-old man who served
two tours of duty in Iraq on the front
lines and a 56-year-old Lakota Sioux
Native American man. He says that the
mentoring is most enjoyable. (rcblair@
hotmail.com)
Steve Bellovin (Ph.D. 1982) recently
published a paper on cryptologic his-tory
titled, “Frank Miller: Inventor
of the One-Time Pad.” (Cryptologia,
2011, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 203-222)
An article about his research was
published in the New York Times in
July and can be read at http://www.ny-times.
com/2011/07/26/science/26code.html.
(smb@cs.columbia.edu)
Chuck Mosher (M.S. 1987) was re-cently
promoted to Manager, Public
Sector Middleware and Cloud Solu-tions
Architects at Red Hat. He joined
Red Hat when his former company,
MetaMatrix, was acquired in May
2007. The industry-leading data in-tegration
technology pioneered by
MetaMatrix has now been released
as an open source-based product, the
JBoss Enterprise Data Services Plat-form.
(chuckm@bellsouth.net)
Ray Van Dyke, J.D., (M.S. 1989) has
been appointed the Chair of the Pro-fessionalism
and Ethics Committee
of the American Intellectual Property
Law Association, and recently pub-lished
an article on patent reform en-titled
“Patents Shrugged Redux.” His
wife Diana was the recipient of a 2011
Golden Heart Award for her novel Spy
in the Mirror. (vandykelaw@aol.com)
Randy Brown (M.S. 1990) was re-cently
promoted to Director, Virtual
Heroes Division, of Applied Research
Associates. Randy has been with Vir-tual
Heroes since its inception in 2004
and through its acquisition by ARA
in 2009. Virtual Heroes creates real-time,
immersive, interactive 3D train-ing
and education environments using
the Epic Unreal game engine. He is
still happily married to Alli who has
supported him through all of this.
(randy@virtualheroes.com)
Yen-Ping Shan (Ph.D. 1990) has cre-ated
a golf training aid (a hobby proj-ect
of his). He says he would be happy
to send any department faculty, staff,
student or alumnus a free one. To take
him up on his offer, contact Shan via
the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of
the www.surewrist.com link and indicate
that you are affiliated with the depart-ment.
( ypshan@bizwoh.rr.com)
Thomas Lassanske (M.S. 2002) is
now serving as Technical Producer for
id Software’s next “Doom” title. (tlas-sanske@
gmail.com)
Mark R. Lindsey (M.S. 2003) pre-sented
the paper “What Went Wrong?
Negative Results from VoIP Service
Providers” at the ACM IPTComm
2011 conference. Mark is an engineer
at ECG, a consulting firm focused on
supporting telephone companies as
they build VoIP networks. He and his
family live in Raleigh, N.C. (lindsey@e-c-
group.com)
Shelby Funk (Ph.D. 2004) was re-cently
promoted to associate professor
ALUMNI NEWS with tenure at the University of Geor-gia,
Department of Computer Science.
(shelby@cs.uga.edu)
Miguel Otaduy (Ph.D. 2004) and his
students received the Best Student Pa-per
Award at the World Haptics Con-ference
2011. The paper, titled “Hap-tic
Navigation Along Filiform Neural
Structures,” was also among the fi-nalists
for the Best Paper Award for
the conference. Miguel also recently
received a highly competitive ERC
Starting Grant from the European
Union for his project Animetrics. The
award totals €1.3 M over five years.
(miguel.otaduy@urjc.es)
Theodore (Ted) Kim (Ph.D. 2006)
recently moved from Canada where he
was a faculty member at the Univer-sity
of Saskatchewan to join the Uni-versity
of California at Santa Barbara
as an assistant professor in the Media
Arts and Technology Program. (kim@
mat.ucsb.edu)
Eric Bennett (Ph.D. 2007) and his
team at Microsoft released Photosynth
for iPhone in April 2011. Photosynth is
a mobile panorama capture and shar-ing
app. Eric was the lead program
manager for the entire project. Since
its release, there have been more than
4 million downloads of the app, which
is the highest rated panorama app in
the iTunes App Store. (ericb@mac.com)
Aaron Block (Ph.D. 2008) is an as-sistant
professor at Austin College
in Texas. Last school year, he taught
a class on making iPhone Apps for
Austin College, and as a final project,
his students constructed and released
an Austin College iPhone App to the
iTunes App Store. You can read more
about the project at http://www.austin-college.
edu/39171/college-releases-student-made/
(adblock@gmail.com)
Marc Macenko (M.S. 2009) recently
started his second year of law school
at UNC. He is planning to be a patent
continued on page 6
6 News Notes
attorney focusing on software patents
and trying to help innovators in aca-demia.
He will graduate with his J.D.
in 2013. (macenko@gmail.com)
Paul Merrell (Ph.D. 2009) worked as
a postdoc at Stanford University since
graduating from UNC, but recently
started a job at Google. He also recently
presented a paper at SIGGRAPH Asia
and SIGGRAPH. ( pmerrell@cs.unc.edu)
Mark Neyer (M.S. 2009) is now the
CTO of a company called Popover
Games. The company makes multi-player
card games for the web with
iPhone and Android versions soon to
follow. He is currently living in Kiev,
Ukraine, where the company’s out-sourcing
firm is based. (mark@markp-neyer.
com)
Undergraduate Alumni
Michael White (B.S.M.Sci. 1988)
was recently promoted to associate
professor with tenure in the Depart-ment
of Linguistics at the Ohio State
University, where he works on lan-guage
technology. (mwhite@brutus.
ling.ohio-state.edu)
Steve Cotton (B.S.M.Sci. 1997) has
worked in the video gaming industry
since graduating from UNC, first for
Red Storm Entertainment, then for
Microsoft, and most recently (since
2004) for Bungie in Seattle. (www.bun-gie.
net) He reports that he is happy to
talk to any future grads or alumni who
might be interested in learning more
about working in the booming video
gaming industry. (scotton@bungie.com)
Paul Suh (B.S.M.Sci. 2000) will be
presenting at the National Institute
of Science and Technology’s 7th
Annual Security Automation Con-ference
in Arlington, Va., October
31 – November 2, 2011. Paul will
be covering “Emerging Trends in
Automated Continuous Monitoring
Operations Research” as part of the
Continuous Monitoring Track. Please
refer to http://scap.nist.gov/events/index.
html for more information on regis-tration
and the latest conference de-tails.
(suh_paul@bah.com)
Charles Campbell (B.S.M.Sci.
2001) recently joined the startup
company Socialvest (www.socialvest.
us) as full-time CTO. The founder of
Socialvest is UNC Computer Science
alum Adam Ross (B.S.M.Sci. 2001).
Socialvest allows shoppers to donate
a portion of the money they spend to
charities of their choosing. The com-pany
recently raised $1 million in
Series A funding. (charles_campbell@
alumni.unc.edu)
Michael Jay Manalo (B.S.M.Sci.
2001) graduated with his Ph.D. in
Counseling Psychology from the
University of Georgia on August 6,
2011. He is now working as a post-doctoral
fellow at a psychology pri-vate
practice in Athens, Ga. (michael.
jay.manalo@gmail.com)
Nick Carr (B.S. 2002) is finish-ing
his clerkship with Chief Justice
Parker of the N.C. Supreme Court,
and will be moving to Greensboro
to become a patent attorney with
Patterson & Sheridan, LLP, where
he will be focusing on software and
technology patents. (nickc@email.unc.
edu)
Mark Huntington Snyder (B.S.
2004) completed his Ph.D. in Com-puter
Science in July 2011 at the Uni-versity
of Kansas. He recently started
work as a Term Assistant Professor
at George Mason University in Fair-fax,
Va. He says it sure is nice getting
back to the east coast! (muddsnyder@
yahoo.com)
Friends of the Department
Liyun Yu, a postdoctoral fellow in
1994-1996 working with Steve Pizer,
was promoted as a senior member of
ACM in 2010 and a senior member
of IEEE in 2011. He was also elected
as a board member and second vice
president of the InfraGard East Caro-lina
Chapter from 2010-2011. He is
currently a systems specialist working
in the Department of Radiation On-cology
at UNC. (liyunyu@med.unc.edu)
FAMILY MATTERS
Thomas Lassanske (M.S.
2002) and his wife, Roraima,
welcomed a daughter, Chloe So-fia,
on Feb 8, 2010, in Rockwall,
Texas. Chloe joins big brother,
Christopher, age 5. (tlassanske@
gmail.com)
Mark Lindsey (M.S. 2003) and
his wife, Hayden, welcomed a
son, Simeon, in June 2010. Sim-eon
joins big brother, Oren,
born in 2007. (lindsey@e-c-group.
com)
Charles Campbell (B.S.M.Sci.
2001) and his wife, Johnavae,
welcomed a daughter, Charlyse
Elaine, on April 10, 2011, in
Chapel Hill, N.C. (charles_camp-bell@
alumni.unc.edu)
Jeff Terrell (Ph.D. 2009) mar-ried
Emily Nisch on May 7,
2011, at Ayr Mount in Hillsbor-ough,
N.C. (jeff.terrell@acm.org)
Michael Stewart (B.S. 2007)
married Emily Mays on July
9, 2011, at Tanglewood Park
in Clemmons, N.C. (michael@
thegreatmichael.com)
Brian Clipp (Ph.D. 2010) and
his wife, Rachel, welcomed a
son, Robert Boyles, on Au-gust
29, 2011, in Durham, N.C.
(bclipp@cs.unc.edu)
Alumni News, continued from page 5
News Notes4 7
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Alhadidi, A., L. Cevidanes, A. Mol, J. Ludlow,
and M. Styner. “Comparison of two methods
for quantitative assessment of mandibular asym-metry
using cone beam computed tomography
image volumes,” Dento Maxillo Facial Radiolog y,
Sept. 2011, vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 351-357.
Alterovitz, R., S. Patil, and A. Derbakova.
“Rapidly-Exploring Roadmaps: weighing ex-ploration
vs. refinement in optimal motion
planning,” Proc. of the IEEE International Confer-ence
on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2011,
pp. 3706-3712.
Antani, L., A. Chandak, M. Taylor, and D.
Manocha. “Direct-to-indirect acoustic radiance
transfer,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and
Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2011.
Bastoni, A., B. Brandenburg, and J. Anderson.
“Is semi-partitioned scheduling practical?,”
Proc. of the 23rd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time
Systems, Porto, Portugal, IEEE Computer Soci-ety
Press, July 2011, pp. 125-135.
Brandenburg, B., and J. Anderson. “Real-time
resource-sharing under clustered scheduling:
mutex, reader-writer, and k-exclusion locks,”
Proc. of the International Conference on Embedded Soft-ware,
Taipei, Taiwan, ACM Press, Oct. 2011.
Derbakova, A., N. Correll, and D. Rus. “Decen-tralized
self-repair to maintain connectivity and
coverage in networked multi-robot systems,”
Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robot-ics
and Automation (ICRA), 2011.
Eastwood, B., L. Mair, and R. Taylor II. “A
structured illumination method for microscope
stage tracking,” Proc. of the International Conference
on Image Processing, Computer Vision, and Pattern
Recognition, 2011, pp. 201-207.
Elliott, G., and J. Anderson. “An optimal k-exclusion
real-time locking protocol motivated
by multi-GPU systems,” Proc. of the 19th Interna-tional
Conference on Real-Time and Network Systems,
Nantes, France, Sept. 2011.
Elliott, G., and J. Anderson. “Real-world con-straints
of GPUs in real-time systems,” Proc. of
the First International Workshop on Cyber-Physical
Systems, Networks, and Applications, Toyama, Ja-pan,
IEEE Computer Society Press, Aug. 2011.
Fronczek, D., C. Quammen, H. Wang, C.
Kisker, R. Superfine, R. Taylor II, D. Erie, and
I. Tessmer. (2011). “High accuracy FIONA-AFM
hybrid imaging,” Ultramicroscopy, 2011, vol.
111, no. 5, pp. 350-355.
Guy, S. J., S. Kim, M. C. Lin, and D. Mano-cha.
“Simulating heterogeneous crowd behav-iors
using personality trait theory,” ACM SIG-GRAPH/
Eurographics Symposium on Computer
Animation (SCA), 2011.
Kenna, C., J. Herman, B. Brandenburg, A.
Mills, and J. Anderson. “Soft real-time on mul-tiprocessors:
are analysis-based schedulers re-ally
worth it?,” Proc. of the 32nd IEEE Real-Time
Systems Symposium, Vienna, Austria, IEEE Com-puter
Society Press, Dec. 2011, to appear.
Liu, C., and J. Anderson. “Supporting graph-based
real-time applications in distributed sys-tems,”
Proc. of the 17th IEEE International Confer-ence
on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems
and Applications, Toyama, Japan, IEEE Comput-er
Society Press, Aug. 2011.
Lobaton, E., J. Zhang, S. Patil, and R. Altero-vitz.
“Planning curvature-constrained paths to
multiple goals using circle sampling,” Proc. of the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Auto-mation
(ICRA), May 2011, pp. 1463-1469.
Lovewell, R., and J. Kaur. “Impact of cross-traffic
burstiness on the packet-scale paradigm,”
Proc. of the 18th IEEE Workshop on Local and Metro-politan
Area Networks (LANMAN 2011), Chapel
Hill, NC, Oct. 2011.
Mills, A., and J. Anderson. “A multiprocessor
server-based scheduler for soft real-time tasks
with stochastic execution demand,” Proc. of the
17th IEEE International Conference on Embedded
and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications,
Toyama, Japan, IEEE Computer Society Press,
Aug. 2011.
Mollison, M., and J. Anderson. “Virtual real-time
scheduling,” Proc. of the Seventh International
Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embed-ded
Real-Time Applications, Porto, Portugal, July
2011, pp. 33-40.
Niethammer, M., G. Hart, D. Pace, P. Vespa, A.
Irimia, J. van Horn, and S. Aylward. “Geometric
metamorphosis,” Proc. of the Conference on Medical
Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention
(MICCAI), 2011, to appear.
Niethammer, M., Y. Huang, and F. Vialard.
“Geodesic regression for image time-series,”
Proc. of the Conference on Medical Image Computing and
Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2011, to
appear.
Olivier, S., A. Porterfield, K. Wheeler, and J.
Prins. “Scheduling task parallelism on multi-socket
multicore systems,” Proc. of the Interna-tional
Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems
for Supercomputers (ROSS 2011), ACM, Tucson,
Arizona, May 2011, pp. 49-56.
Pan, J., and D. Manocha. “Fast GPU-based lo-cality
sensitive hashing for K-nearest neighbor
computation,” International Conference on Advances
in Geographic Information Systems (GIS 2011), 2011.
Pan, J., L. Zhang, and D. Manocha. “Collision-free
and curvature-continuous path smoothing
in cluttered environments,” Robotics: Science and
Systems (RSS), 2011.
Pan, J., S. Chitta, and D. Manocha. “Probabi-listic
collision detection between noisy point
clouds using robust classification,” International
Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), 2011.
Paniagua, B., A. Alhadidi, L. Cevidanes, M.
Styner, and I. Oguz. “Mandibular asymmetry
characterization using generalized tensor-based
morphometry,” IEEE Symposium on Biomedical
Imaging, 2011, pp. 1-4.
Patil, S., J. van den Berg, and R. Alterovitz.
“Motion planning under uncertainty in highly
deformable environments,” Proc. of Robotics: Sci-ence
and Systems, June 2011.
Peck, T., H. Fuchs, and M. Whitton. “An evalua-tion
of navigational ability comparing redirected
free exploration with distractors to walking-in-place
and joystick locomotion interfaces,” Proc.
of IEEE Virtual Reality, Singapore, Mar. 19-23,
2011.
Quammen, C., and R. Taylor II. “Grid voxeliza-tion
with partial volume effects in VTK,” VTK
Journal, March 2011.
Sewall, J., D. Wilkie, and M. C. Lin. “Interactive
hybrid simulation of large-scale traffic,” ACM
Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia),
2011, vol. 30.
Shi, X., J. G. Ibrahim, J. Lieberman, M. Styner,
and H. Zhu. “Two-Stage empirical likelihood
for longitudinal neuroimaging data,” The Annals
of Applied Statistics, vol. 5, no. 2, June 2011, pp.
1132-1158.
Singh, D., C. F. Orellana, Y. Hu, C. D. Jones, Y.
Liu, D. Y. Chiang, J. Liu, and J. F. Prins. “FDM:
A graph-based statistical method to detect dif-ferential
transcription using RNA-seq data,”
Bioinformatics, 2011.
Spero, R., R. Sircar, R. Shubert, R. Taylor II, A.
Wolberg, and R. Superfine. “Nanoparticle diffu-sion
measures bulk clot permeability,” Biophysical
Journal, 2011, vol. 101, no. 4, pp. 943-950.
Stephens, A., J. Haase, L. Vicci, R. Taylor II,
and K. Bloom. “Cohesin, condensin, and the
intramolecular centromere loop together gener-ate
the mitotic chromatin spring,” Journal of Cell
Biolog y, 2011, vol. 193, no. 7, pp. 1167-1180.
Talib, H., M. Peterhans, J. García, M. Styner,
and M. A. González Ballester. “Information
filtering for ultrasound-based real-time registra-tion,”
IEEE Transactions on Bio-medical Engineer-ing,
vol. 58, no. 3, Mar. 2011, pp. 531-540.
Tang, M. D. Manocha, S.-E. Yoon, P. Du, J.-P.
Heo, and R.-F. Tong. “VolCCD: fast continuous
collision culling between deforming volume
meshes,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2011.
van den Berg, J., S. Patil, and R. Alterovitz.
“Motion planning under uncertainty using dif-ferential
dynamic programming in belief space,”
Proc. of the International Symposium on Robotics Re-search
(ISRR), Aug. 2011.
Wilkie, D., J. van den Berg, M. C. Lin, and D.
Manocha. “Self-aware traffic route planning,”
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI),
2011, pp. 1521-1527.
Ye, G., and R. Alterovitz. “Demonstration-guided
motion planning,” Proc. of the International Symposium
on Robotics Research (ISRR), Aug. 2011.
Non Profit Org
US Postage
PAID
Permit 177
department of computer science Chapel Hill NC
college of arts & sciences
The University of North Carolina
cb# 3175, BROO KS COMPUTER SCIENCE
BUILDING
Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3175
editor
Kelli Gaskill
gaskill@cs.unc.edu
General Information
voice: (919) 962-1700
FAX: (919) 962-1799
E-mail: info@cs.unc.edu
web: www.cs.unc.edu
Address corrections, submissions, and for
information about our publications:
pubs@cs.unc.edu
UNC is an Equal Opportunity/
Afirmative Action Institution
Let us know where you are and
what you are doing so that we can
include you in our next issue! Send
us information via e-mail to pubs@
cs.unc.edu; fax it to (919) 962-1799;
or mail it to the address above, c/o
News & Notes. If you fax or mail
your information, please include your
e-mail address.
Throughout News & Notes, we list
degree information for all our B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D. Computer Science
and Math Sciences alumni.
News Notes
Accounting Manager Catherine Perry celebrated 35 years of continuous state service on
August 31, 2011. All but two of those years have been in the Department of Computer
Science. Catherine joined the department as a secretary in August 1978. Prior to joining
the department, she worked for two years as a tape librarian in the Computation Center
in Phillips Hall.

News Notes F a l l 2 0 1 1 􀀁􀄠 I s s u e F o r t y - e i g h t C o m p S c i @ C a r o l i n a
Dear Friends,
Fall has arrived in Chapel Hill, and with it, a new crop of graduate and undergraduate students. This summer
was a busy one. In August, we launched a new department web site, just in time for the new school year. If
you haven’t visited the new www.cs.unc.edu, be sure to check it out!
Also in August, we welcomed Assistant Professor Vladimir Jojic to the department. Vladimir is an addition
to our bioinformatics and computational biology research group and an associate member of the Lineberger
Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Unfortunately, this summer we said farewell to our long-time colleague and alumus Greg Welch, who joined
the faculty of the University of Central Florida. He maintains a part-time appointment here, however, and will continue to col-laborate
with faculty and students.
Congratulations to Research Professor and alumna Diane Pozefsky, who was recently named to the Women in Technology In-ternational
Hall of Fame. You can read more about Diane on page 2.
Congratulations also to Professor Steve Pizer, on being recognized as a Fellow of the Medical Image Computing and Computer-
Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Society at this year’s meeting. MICCAI is the premier society in the field of medical image
computing. You can read more about Steve’s honor in the Fall 2010 News & Notes.
This year’s alumni fellowship recipient is Stephen Olivier. You can read more about his research on page 3, and, as promised in
our last issue, you can also learn more about ways you can support the department.
We’d love to have you visit! Please be sure to stop by the department whenever you are
in the area.
For more than two decades, Internet appli-cations
have been relying on the standard
transport protocol TCP (Transmission Con-trol
Protocol) to make best usage of avail-able
network resources. However, even the
state-of-the-art TCP variants now fail to scale
to high enough network speeds to meet the
requirements of the computational science
communities. To address this problem, Asso-ciate
Professor Jasleen Kaur and her research
team have decided to do away with the tra-ditional
TCP framework of operation and
create a novel paradigm that can be scaled to
even Terabit-and-higher speeds.
The standard TCP framework tries to figure
out how fast it can send data by sending some
packets at a particular rate and seeing if those
packets make their way through the network
or not. This probing is done for a time dura-tion
of about the round-trip time (RTT) of
the network path (RTT-scale probing). De-
MAKING HIGH-SPED NETWORKS FASTER
continued on page 2
pending on whether the packets make their
way through or not, TCP scales up or down
the rate at which subsequent packets are sent.
Due to the large RTT-scale used for probing,
even the best of current protocols have trou-ble
achieving several Gigabits-per-second
(Gbps) speeds without the risk of serious
congestion collapse on the network.
Kaur’s approach sheds the legacy RTT-scale
framework and instead designs the packet-scale
congestion control paradigm. This new paradigm
enables the protocol to operate at fine times-cales
and at a frequency close to the frequency
of packet transmissions. The paradigm relies
on two main ideas. The first is fine-scale probing,
which generates finely-controlled inter-pack-et
spacing at the sender and observes changes
in these at the receiver to estimate the cur-rent
available bandwidth in the network. The
second is probing-without-overloading, which
In this issue
1 Making High-Speed
Networks Faster
2 Diane Pozefsky Named
to WITI Hall of Fame
3 How You Can Support
the CS Department
3 Alumni Fellowship
Recipient
4 Department News
5 Alumni News
6 Family Matters
7 Recent Publications
2 News Notes
DIANE POZEFSKY NAMED TO WITI HAL OF FAME
Networks, continued from page 1
exploits the fine-scale of probing to
probe for a wide range of sending rates
within an RTT, without causing persis-tent
queuing at bottleneck links. The
paradigm also helps truly achieve RTT
fairness and friendliness to conventional
TCP traffic — two goals that have so
far remained elusive to high-speed trans-port
protocols.
To test this new paradigm, Kaur is part-nering
with the Renaissance Computing
Institute (RENCI) to use their Breakable
Experimental Network (BEN), a region-al
optical network test bed for experi-ments
with disruptive networking tech-nologies.
BEN can also be connected to
the National Lambda Rail (NLR), the
high-speed research network that con-nects
universities across the U.S. This al-lows
the researchers to use the machines
in the computer science department as
servers and clients and emulate very
long distance network paths by setting
up a path beginning in the networking
lab at UNC, going through BEN to the
NLR through several
cities across the U.S.
and returning to BEN
and to the lab in the CS
department.
Kaur has recently re-ceived
two National
Science Foundation
grants to support the
research on the para-digm.
The focus of
the first grant is on
investigating research
challenges including
the sensitivity of the
paradigm to “noise”
in the end-to-end delays experienced
by packets, the implementation of fine-scaled
inter-packet spacing in current
end-systems, and the stability, sensitiv-ity
and fairness of the paradigm under
highly-aggregated and stressful traffic
conditions. The second grant is for de-veloping
a production-quality ultra-high
speed implementation of the paradigm
on the Linux operating system, and de-
Photo by Mary Lide Parker, College of Arts & Sciences
Research Professor and alumna Diane
Pozefsky has been named to the Wom-en
in Technology International (WITI)
Hall of Fame for 2011.
Diane earned her Ph.D. from UNC
in 1979 and then worked at IBM for
25 years. While at IBM, Diane worked
on the design of networking architec-tures
and their product implementa-tions.
Her 25 patents earned her the
title of IBM Master Inventor in 1996.
When she was named an IBM Fellow
in 1994, there had only been one oth-er
woman previously given the honor.
Her contributions were also recog-nized
by her peers as they elected her
to the IBM Academy of Technology
and to two terms on the Academy’s
governing council.
When she retired from IBM in 2004,
Diane returned to UNC as a faculty
member.
“Since coming back to UNC, Diane
has been most committed to
undergraduate education and
to teaching the computer sci-ence
courses for non-computer
science majors – indeed, for
students scared of technology,”
said Dr. Fred Brooks, Kenan
Professor of Computer Sci-ence
and department founder.
“Equally valuable has been
her teaching our graduate and
undergraduate COMP 523:
Software Engineering Laboratory, to
which she brings experience no one
else on our faculty can touch. I cre-ated
this course based on my own in-dustry
experience. I taught it 22 times;
she does it better.”
Diane’s work with undergraduates has
not gone unnoticed. She has won the
undergraduate teaching award, voted
on by the department’s graduating
seniors, three times, most recently in
May 2011. She was also instrumental
in establishing an internship compo-nent
to the computer science educa-tion
and in getting the combined B.S.-
M.S. program up and running.
Diane is one of five inductees into
the WITI Hall of Fame for 2011. The
WITI Hall of Fame was established
in 1996 by WITI to recognize, honor,
and promote the outstanding contri-butions
women make to the scientific
and technological communities that
improve and evolve our society. WITI
is the leading trade organization for
women in technology.
ploying it on the infrastructure of three
scientific research projects. Prof. Don
Smith is a co-PI on this project. The
targeted infrastructures are those of the
UNC Institute for the Environment,
Carolina Center for Genome Sciences,
and the Los Alamos National Lab.
More information about this research is
available at: http://rapid.web.unc.edu
News Notes83
Stephen Olivier is the recipient of
the 2011-2012 Computer Science
Alumni Fellowship. This fellowship is
awarded annually to a Ph.D. candidate
in his or her final year of study, allow-ing
the student to work full time on
dissertation research. Generous con-tributions
by alumni and friends help
to make this fellowship possible.
Power and speed-of-light limitations
have given us processors that offer
multiple computing cores instead
of a single, but faster, processor.
Hence parallel execution is now the
principal route to increased perfor-mance.
However parallel program-ming
models are still quite rudimen-tary
and oriented toward details of
the parallel processor architectures
rather than addressing parallelism in
a problem-centric framework. Task
parallel programming is a high-level
shared memory programming para-digm
well suited to the construction
of adaptive and recursive algorithms
in scientific computing and other
areas. The computation to be per-formed
is presented in the form of
interdependent tasks created in the
course of program execution in an
input-dependent fashion that often
cannot be analyzed a priori.
Stephen is working with Professor
Jan Prins to develop efficient task
scheduling strategies that balance
load among the processors while pre-serving
locality of reference among
tasks on modern shared memory
systems, with their complex cache
hierarchies and non-uniform memo-ry
access characteristics. A subset of
these strategies is transparent to the
programmer, while others allow the
programmer to express explicit local-ity
constraints to inform the schedul-er.
Working with Alan Porterfield at
RENCI, Stephen has implemented
his task schedulers using the open-source
Qthreads multi-threading li-brary,
distributed by Sandia National
Laboratories, to run full-size task
parallel applications expressed using
the OpenMP standard.
Evaluations demonstrate improve-ment
in parallel speedup on bench-mark
OpenMP task parallel applica-tions
over existing state-of-the-art
schedulers in the Intel and GNU
OpenMP run time systems. Stephen
has also developed performance
analysis techniques to measure run
time overheads, non-local data ac-cess
costs, and load imbalance. His
Unbalanced Tree Search (UTS)
benchmark evaluates the scalability
of dynamic load balancing strategies
on a wide range of parallel systems,
from multi-core machines to clusters
of thousands of processors.
ALUMNI FELO WSHIP RECIPIENT - STEPHEN OLIVIER
With the continued cuts in state
funding, the Department of Com-puter
Science depends on the sup-port
of our alumni and friends today
more than ever. Some of you may
wish to make general gifts to the de-partment
without a designation. To
those of you who select this option,
we say thank you! Others may wish
to designate your gift for a particular
program. If this describes you, there
are a number of ways you can sup-port
the department. Here are four
examples:
1. The Computer Science Alumni
Fellowship is awarded each year to
a Ph.D. candidate in his or her final
year of study. This award allows stu-dents
to work full time on disserta-tion
research. Recipients are selected
based on the quality of their research
and service.
HOW YOU CAN SUPORT THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE!
2. The Stephen F. Weiss Award for
Outstanding Achievement in Com-puter
Science was established in 2010
and is awarded annually to a rising
senior in computer science who has
already demonstrated significant ac-complishments.
3. Enabling technology research is
the passion of professor and alum-nus
Gary Bishop (Ph.D. 1984). Pro-grams
you can support include Maze
Day, an annual free-to-attend event
which brings blind and visually im-paired
children, and their parents
and teachers, to visit the department
for a day of experiencing fun and
educational computer applications
developed especially for them, and
Tar Heel Reader, a web-based collec-tion
of free, easy-to-read, accessible
books on a wide range of topics. You
can find out more about Gary’s re-search
on his web site: http://www.
cs.unc.edu/~gb/
4. The Graduate Student Lounge
needs renovating! It’s the one place
in Sitterson Hall and Brooks Build-ing
where students can escape from
work to play Foosball, watch tele-vision,
or just catch a nap, but it’s
showing signs of wear and tear. The
lounge needs new furniture, game
tables, and so on.
To donate to the department, you
can make checks payable to the UNC
Computer Science Department, and
mail them to:
Department of Computer Science
CB# 3175, Brooks Computer Sci-ence
Building
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175
4 News Notes
DEPARTMENT NEWS
WELCOME
New Faculty
Vladimir Jojic is an assistant profes-sor
doing research in bioinformatics,
computational biology and machine
learning, and an associate member of
the Lineberger Comprehensive Can-cer
Center. He joined the department
in August. Vladimir earned his Ph.D.
in computer science in 2007 from the
University of Toronto. Prior to join-ing
the department, he was a postdoc-toral
researcher at Stanford.
New Staff
Joe Ping-Lin Hsiao joined the de-partment
in May 2011 as a research
engineer working with Russ Taylor
and the CISMM group.
Jodie Turnbull joined the depart-ment
as Student Services Manager in
May 2011. Previously she had served
as the administrative manager in the
Department of Marine Sciences.
Visiting Researchers and Faculty
Wenxi Liu is a Visiting Scholar from
the City University of Hong Kong
visiting Dinesh Manocha from Sep-tember
1 - November 30, 2011.
THANKS AND FAREWELL
Edgar Lobaton, postdoctoral re-searcher
working with Ron Altero-vitz,
left the department in August
2011. He is now an assistant profes-sor
in the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering at North
Carolina State University.
Herman Towles, senior research
associate, left the department in July
2011.
Jur van den Berg, postdoctoral re-searcher
working with the GAMMA
group, left the department in May
2011. He is now an assistant profes-sor
in the School of Computing at
the University of Utah.
Greg Welch (Ph.D. 1996), research
professor, has accepted a joint posi-tion
in the Institute for Simulation
& Training and the Department of
Computer Science at the University
of Central Florida. Greg is maintain-ing
a part-time appointment at UNC
as he continues to collaborate with
faculty and students here. The move
offers a great opportunity to pursue
ideas he has for “physical-virtual re-ality,”
in the context of simulation,
training, and education.
CONGRATULATIONS Faculty and Staff
Jan-Michael Frahm was named an
assistant professor, tenure-track, in
July 2011.
A paper co-authored by Postdoctoral
Researcher Adrian Ilie (Ph.D. 2010)
and Research Professor Greg Welch
(Ph.D. 1996) received second prize
in the Best Paper Awards at ACM/
IEEE International Conference on
Distributed Smart Cameras 2011.
The paper was titled “On-Line Con-trol
of Active Camera Networks for
Computer Vision Tasks.”
Catherine Perry, accounting man-ager,
celebrated 35 years of continu-ous
state service on August 31, 2011.
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
Ketan Mayer-Patel is local arrange-ment
chair for the ACM Multimedia
Systems (MMSys) 2012 conference,
to be held in Chapel Hill on Febru-ary
22-24, 2012.
RECENT SPONSORED
RESEARCH AWARDS
Automatic Quantitative Analysis of
MR Images of the Knee in Osteoar-thritis.
PI: Marc Niethammer. Nation-al
Institute of Arthritis Musculoskel-etal
Skin Disease.
CSR: Small: A Comprehensive Frame-work
for Real-Time Multiprocessor
Synchronization. PI: Jim Anderson,
Co-PI: Sanjoy Baruah. National Sci-ence
Foundation.
EAGER: Automatic Reconstruction
of Typed Input from Compromising
Reflections. PI: Jan-Michael Frahm,
Co-PI: Fabian Monrose. National Sci-ence
Foundation.
Genome Dynamics: Evolution, Orga-nization
and Function. PIs: Wei Wang
and Leonard McMillan. Jackson Lab-oratory.
III: Small: Supporting US-Based Stu-dents
to Attend the 2011 IEEE Inter-national
Conference on Data Mining
(ICDM 2011). PI: Wei Wang. National
Science Foundation.
NSF Support for the 2011 USENIX
Security Symposium, Financial Aid;
August 2011; San Francisco, Calif. PI:
Fabian Monrose. National Science
Foundation.
SDCI NET: Development of an Ul-tra-
high Speed End-to-end Transport
Stack based on the Packet Design Par-adigm.
PI: Jasleen Kaur Sahni, Co-PI:
F. Don Smith. National Science Foun-dation.
SDCI Sec: New Software Platforms
for Supporting Network-wide Detec-tion
of Code Injection Attacks. PI: Fa-bian
Monrose, Co-PI: Montek Singh.
National Science Foundation.
SHB:Small:Computing Robot Motions
for Home Healthcare Assistance. PI:
Ron Alterovitz, Co-PI: Dinesh Mano-cha.
National Science Foundation.
STTR-Interactive Acoustic Simulation
in Urban and Complex Environments.
PIs: Dinesh Manocha, Ming Lin. Im-pulsonic,
Inc.
TC: Small: Server-side Verification of
Client Behavior in Distributed Appli-cations.
PI: Michael Reiter. National
Science Foundation.
Travel Support for Workshop on Mod-eling,
Simulation and Visual Analysis
of Large Crowds. PI: Dinesh Mano-cha.
National Science Foundation.
Women in Bioinformatics Initiative
at ACM BCB 2011 - Conference Sup-port.
PI: Wei Wang. National Science
Foundation.
News Notes65
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Rodger Blair (M.S. 1969) and his
wife, Charlene, retired from their re-spective
jobs at McKesson Corpora-tion
and Shady Side Academy on June
10, 2011. They then packed up their
goods and moved 1900 miles to Las
Cruces, N.M., where they had previ-ously
purchased a home in 2010. Rod-ger
reports that they love it there. He
is currently writing the business plan
for his new business, SofTechMetrics,
LLC, a software process management
consulting company. He says they have
found a great church in their new city,
Sierra Vista Community Church, and
that Charlene will be teaching English
as a Second Language (ESL) at the
church to Spanish-speaking adults.
Rodger is keeping busy with his own
volunteer work as a mentor to two
men: a 29-year-old man who served
two tours of duty in Iraq on the front
lines and a 56-year-old Lakota Sioux
Native American man. He says that the
mentoring is most enjoyable. (rcblair@
hotmail.com)
Steve Bellovin (Ph.D. 1982) recently
published a paper on cryptologic his-tory
titled, “Frank Miller: Inventor
of the One-Time Pad.” (Cryptologia,
2011, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 203-222)
An article about his research was
published in the New York Times in
July and can be read at http://www.ny-times.
com/2011/07/26/science/26code.html.
(smb@cs.columbia.edu)
Chuck Mosher (M.S. 1987) was re-cently
promoted to Manager, Public
Sector Middleware and Cloud Solu-tions
Architects at Red Hat. He joined
Red Hat when his former company,
MetaMatrix, was acquired in May
2007. The industry-leading data in-tegration
technology pioneered by
MetaMatrix has now been released
as an open source-based product, the
JBoss Enterprise Data Services Plat-form.
(chuckm@bellsouth.net)
Ray Van Dyke, J.D., (M.S. 1989) has
been appointed the Chair of the Pro-fessionalism
and Ethics Committee
of the American Intellectual Property
Law Association, and recently pub-lished
an article on patent reform en-titled
“Patents Shrugged Redux.” His
wife Diana was the recipient of a 2011
Golden Heart Award for her novel Spy
in the Mirror. (vandykelaw@aol.com)
Randy Brown (M.S. 1990) was re-cently
promoted to Director, Virtual
Heroes Division, of Applied Research
Associates. Randy has been with Vir-tual
Heroes since its inception in 2004
and through its acquisition by ARA
in 2009. Virtual Heroes creates real-time,
immersive, interactive 3D train-ing
and education environments using
the Epic Unreal game engine. He is
still happily married to Alli who has
supported him through all of this.
(randy@virtualheroes.com)
Yen-Ping Shan (Ph.D. 1990) has cre-ated
a golf training aid (a hobby proj-ect
of his). He says he would be happy
to send any department faculty, staff,
student or alumnus a free one. To take
him up on his offer, contact Shan via
the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of
the www.surewrist.com link and indicate
that you are affiliated with the depart-ment.
( ypshan@bizwoh.rr.com)
Thomas Lassanske (M.S. 2002) is
now serving as Technical Producer for
id Software’s next “Doom” title. (tlas-sanske@
gmail.com)
Mark R. Lindsey (M.S. 2003) pre-sented
the paper “What Went Wrong?
Negative Results from VoIP Service
Providers” at the ACM IPTComm
2011 conference. Mark is an engineer
at ECG, a consulting firm focused on
supporting telephone companies as
they build VoIP networks. He and his
family live in Raleigh, N.C. (lindsey@e-c-
group.com)
Shelby Funk (Ph.D. 2004) was re-cently
promoted to associate professor
ALUMNI NEWS with tenure at the University of Geor-gia,
Department of Computer Science.
(shelby@cs.uga.edu)
Miguel Otaduy (Ph.D. 2004) and his
students received the Best Student Pa-per
Award at the World Haptics Con-ference
2011. The paper, titled “Hap-tic
Navigation Along Filiform Neural
Structures,” was also among the fi-nalists
for the Best Paper Award for
the conference. Miguel also recently
received a highly competitive ERC
Starting Grant from the European
Union for his project Animetrics. The
award totals €1.3 M over five years.
(miguel.otaduy@urjc.es)
Theodore (Ted) Kim (Ph.D. 2006)
recently moved from Canada where he
was a faculty member at the Univer-sity
of Saskatchewan to join the Uni-versity
of California at Santa Barbara
as an assistant professor in the Media
Arts and Technology Program. (kim@
mat.ucsb.edu)
Eric Bennett (Ph.D. 2007) and his
team at Microsoft released Photosynth
for iPhone in April 2011. Photosynth is
a mobile panorama capture and shar-ing
app. Eric was the lead program
manager for the entire project. Since
its release, there have been more than
4 million downloads of the app, which
is the highest rated panorama app in
the iTunes App Store. (ericb@mac.com)
Aaron Block (Ph.D. 2008) is an as-sistant
professor at Austin College
in Texas. Last school year, he taught
a class on making iPhone Apps for
Austin College, and as a final project,
his students constructed and released
an Austin College iPhone App to the
iTunes App Store. You can read more
about the project at http://www.austin-college.
edu/39171/college-releases-student-made/
(adblock@gmail.com)
Marc Macenko (M.S. 2009) recently
started his second year of law school
at UNC. He is planning to be a patent
continued on page 6
6 News Notes
attorney focusing on software patents
and trying to help innovators in aca-demia.
He will graduate with his J.D.
in 2013. (macenko@gmail.com)
Paul Merrell (Ph.D. 2009) worked as
a postdoc at Stanford University since
graduating from UNC, but recently
started a job at Google. He also recently
presented a paper at SIGGRAPH Asia
and SIGGRAPH. ( pmerrell@cs.unc.edu)
Mark Neyer (M.S. 2009) is now the
CTO of a company called Popover
Games. The company makes multi-player
card games for the web with
iPhone and Android versions soon to
follow. He is currently living in Kiev,
Ukraine, where the company’s out-sourcing
firm is based. (mark@markp-neyer.
com)
Undergraduate Alumni
Michael White (B.S.M.Sci. 1988)
was recently promoted to associate
professor with tenure in the Depart-ment
of Linguistics at the Ohio State
University, where he works on lan-guage
technology. (mwhite@brutus.
ling.ohio-state.edu)
Steve Cotton (B.S.M.Sci. 1997) has
worked in the video gaming industry
since graduating from UNC, first for
Red Storm Entertainment, then for
Microsoft, and most recently (since
2004) for Bungie in Seattle. (www.bun-gie.
net) He reports that he is happy to
talk to any future grads or alumni who
might be interested in learning more
about working in the booming video
gaming industry. (scotton@bungie.com)
Paul Suh (B.S.M.Sci. 2000) will be
presenting at the National Institute
of Science and Technology’s 7th
Annual Security Automation Con-ference
in Arlington, Va., October
31 – November 2, 2011. Paul will
be covering “Emerging Trends in
Automated Continuous Monitoring
Operations Research” as part of the
Continuous Monitoring Track. Please
refer to http://scap.nist.gov/events/index.
html for more information on regis-tration
and the latest conference de-tails.
(suh_paul@bah.com)
Charles Campbell (B.S.M.Sci.
2001) recently joined the startup
company Socialvest (www.socialvest.
us) as full-time CTO. The founder of
Socialvest is UNC Computer Science
alum Adam Ross (B.S.M.Sci. 2001).
Socialvest allows shoppers to donate
a portion of the money they spend to
charities of their choosing. The com-pany
recently raised $1 million in
Series A funding. (charles_campbell@
alumni.unc.edu)
Michael Jay Manalo (B.S.M.Sci.
2001) graduated with his Ph.D. in
Counseling Psychology from the
University of Georgia on August 6,
2011. He is now working as a post-doctoral
fellow at a psychology pri-vate
practice in Athens, Ga. (michael.
jay.manalo@gmail.com)
Nick Carr (B.S. 2002) is finish-ing
his clerkship with Chief Justice
Parker of the N.C. Supreme Court,
and will be moving to Greensboro
to become a patent attorney with
Patterson & Sheridan, LLP, where
he will be focusing on software and
technology patents. (nickc@email.unc.
edu)
Mark Huntington Snyder (B.S.
2004) completed his Ph.D. in Com-puter
Science in July 2011 at the Uni-versity
of Kansas. He recently started
work as a Term Assistant Professor
at George Mason University in Fair-fax,
Va. He says it sure is nice getting
back to the east coast! (muddsnyder@
yahoo.com)
Friends of the Department
Liyun Yu, a postdoctoral fellow in
1994-1996 working with Steve Pizer,
was promoted as a senior member of
ACM in 2010 and a senior member
of IEEE in 2011. He was also elected
as a board member and second vice
president of the InfraGard East Caro-lina
Chapter from 2010-2011. He is
currently a systems specialist working
in the Department of Radiation On-cology
at UNC. (liyunyu@med.unc.edu)
FAMILY MATTERS
Thomas Lassanske (M.S.
2002) and his wife, Roraima,
welcomed a daughter, Chloe So-fia,
on Feb 8, 2010, in Rockwall,
Texas. Chloe joins big brother,
Christopher, age 5. (tlassanske@
gmail.com)
Mark Lindsey (M.S. 2003) and
his wife, Hayden, welcomed a
son, Simeon, in June 2010. Sim-eon
joins big brother, Oren,
born in 2007. (lindsey@e-c-group.
com)
Charles Campbell (B.S.M.Sci.
2001) and his wife, Johnavae,
welcomed a daughter, Charlyse
Elaine, on April 10, 2011, in
Chapel Hill, N.C. (charles_camp-bell@
alumni.unc.edu)
Jeff Terrell (Ph.D. 2009) mar-ried
Emily Nisch on May 7,
2011, at Ayr Mount in Hillsbor-ough,
N.C. (jeff.terrell@acm.org)
Michael Stewart (B.S. 2007)
married Emily Mays on July
9, 2011, at Tanglewood Park
in Clemmons, N.C. (michael@
thegreatmichael.com)
Brian Clipp (Ph.D. 2010) and
his wife, Rachel, welcomed a
son, Robert Boyles, on Au-gust
29, 2011, in Durham, N.C.
(bclipp@cs.unc.edu)
Alumni News, continued from page 5
News Notes4 7
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Alhadidi, A., L. Cevidanes, A. Mol, J. Ludlow,
and M. Styner. “Comparison of two methods
for quantitative assessment of mandibular asym-metry
using cone beam computed tomography
image volumes,” Dento Maxillo Facial Radiolog y,
Sept. 2011, vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 351-357.
Alterovitz, R., S. Patil, and A. Derbakova.
“Rapidly-Exploring Roadmaps: weighing ex-ploration
vs. refinement in optimal motion
planning,” Proc. of the IEEE International Confer-ence
on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2011,
pp. 3706-3712.
Antani, L., A. Chandak, M. Taylor, and D.
Manocha. “Direct-to-indirect acoustic radiance
transfer,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and
Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2011.
Bastoni, A., B. Brandenburg, and J. Anderson.
“Is semi-partitioned scheduling practical?,”
Proc. of the 23rd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time
Systems, Porto, Portugal, IEEE Computer Soci-ety
Press, July 2011, pp. 125-135.
Brandenburg, B., and J. Anderson. “Real-time
resource-sharing under clustered scheduling:
mutex, reader-writer, and k-exclusion locks,”
Proc. of the International Conference on Embedded Soft-ware,
Taipei, Taiwan, ACM Press, Oct. 2011.
Derbakova, A., N. Correll, and D. Rus. “Decen-tralized
self-repair to maintain connectivity and
coverage in networked multi-robot systems,”
Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robot-ics
and Automation (ICRA), 2011.
Eastwood, B., L. Mair, and R. Taylor II. “A
structured illumination method for microscope
stage tracking,” Proc. of the International Conference
on Image Processing, Computer Vision, and Pattern
Recognition, 2011, pp. 201-207.
Elliott, G., and J. Anderson. “An optimal k-exclusion
real-time locking protocol motivated
by multi-GPU systems,” Proc. of the 19th Interna-tional
Conference on Real-Time and Network Systems,
Nantes, France, Sept. 2011.
Elliott, G., and J. Anderson. “Real-world con-straints
of GPUs in real-time systems,” Proc. of
the First International Workshop on Cyber-Physical
Systems, Networks, and Applications, Toyama, Ja-pan,
IEEE Computer Society Press, Aug. 2011.
Fronczek, D., C. Quammen, H. Wang, C.
Kisker, R. Superfine, R. Taylor II, D. Erie, and
I. Tessmer. (2011). “High accuracy FIONA-AFM
hybrid imaging,” Ultramicroscopy, 2011, vol.
111, no. 5, pp. 350-355.
Guy, S. J., S. Kim, M. C. Lin, and D. Mano-cha.
“Simulating heterogeneous crowd behav-iors
using personality trait theory,” ACM SIG-GRAPH/
Eurographics Symposium on Computer
Animation (SCA), 2011.
Kenna, C., J. Herman, B. Brandenburg, A.
Mills, and J. Anderson. “Soft real-time on mul-tiprocessors:
are analysis-based schedulers re-ally
worth it?,” Proc. of the 32nd IEEE Real-Time
Systems Symposium, Vienna, Austria, IEEE Com-puter
Society Press, Dec. 2011, to appear.
Liu, C., and J. Anderson. “Supporting graph-based
real-time applications in distributed sys-tems,”
Proc. of the 17th IEEE International Confer-ence
on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems
and Applications, Toyama, Japan, IEEE Comput-er
Society Press, Aug. 2011.
Lobaton, E., J. Zhang, S. Patil, and R. Altero-vitz.
“Planning curvature-constrained paths to
multiple goals using circle sampling,” Proc. of the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Auto-mation
(ICRA), May 2011, pp. 1463-1469.
Lovewell, R., and J. Kaur. “Impact of cross-traffic
burstiness on the packet-scale paradigm,”
Proc. of the 18th IEEE Workshop on Local and Metro-politan
Area Networks (LANMAN 2011), Chapel
Hill, NC, Oct. 2011.
Mills, A., and J. Anderson. “A multiprocessor
server-based scheduler for soft real-time tasks
with stochastic execution demand,” Proc. of the
17th IEEE International Conference on Embedded
and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications,
Toyama, Japan, IEEE Computer Society Press,
Aug. 2011.
Mollison, M., and J. Anderson. “Virtual real-time
scheduling,” Proc. of the Seventh International
Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embed-ded
Real-Time Applications, Porto, Portugal, July
2011, pp. 33-40.
Niethammer, M., G. Hart, D. Pace, P. Vespa, A.
Irimia, J. van Horn, and S. Aylward. “Geometric
metamorphosis,” Proc. of the Conference on Medical
Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention
(MICCAI), 2011, to appear.
Niethammer, M., Y. Huang, and F. Vialard.
“Geodesic regression for image time-series,”
Proc. of the Conference on Medical Image Computing and
Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2011, to
appear.
Olivier, S., A. Porterfield, K. Wheeler, and J.
Prins. “Scheduling task parallelism on multi-socket
multicore systems,” Proc. of the Interna-tional
Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems
for Supercomputers (ROSS 2011), ACM, Tucson,
Arizona, May 2011, pp. 49-56.
Pan, J., and D. Manocha. “Fast GPU-based lo-cality
sensitive hashing for K-nearest neighbor
computation,” International Conference on Advances
in Geographic Information Systems (GIS 2011), 2011.
Pan, J., L. Zhang, and D. Manocha. “Collision-free
and curvature-continuous path smoothing
in cluttered environments,” Robotics: Science and
Systems (RSS), 2011.
Pan, J., S. Chitta, and D. Manocha. “Probabi-listic
collision detection between noisy point
clouds using robust classification,” International
Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), 2011.
Paniagua, B., A. Alhadidi, L. Cevidanes, M.
Styner, and I. Oguz. “Mandibular asymmetry
characterization using generalized tensor-based
morphometry,” IEEE Symposium on Biomedical
Imaging, 2011, pp. 1-4.
Patil, S., J. van den Berg, and R. Alterovitz.
“Motion planning under uncertainty in highly
deformable environments,” Proc. of Robotics: Sci-ence
and Systems, June 2011.
Peck, T., H. Fuchs, and M. Whitton. “An evalua-tion
of navigational ability comparing redirected
free exploration with distractors to walking-in-place
and joystick locomotion interfaces,” Proc.
of IEEE Virtual Reality, Singapore, Mar. 19-23,
2011.
Quammen, C., and R. Taylor II. “Grid voxeliza-tion
with partial volume effects in VTK,” VTK
Journal, March 2011.
Sewall, J., D. Wilkie, and M. C. Lin. “Interactive
hybrid simulation of large-scale traffic,” ACM
Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia),
2011, vol. 30.
Shi, X., J. G. Ibrahim, J. Lieberman, M. Styner,
and H. Zhu. “Two-Stage empirical likelihood
for longitudinal neuroimaging data,” The Annals
of Applied Statistics, vol. 5, no. 2, June 2011, pp.
1132-1158.
Singh, D., C. F. Orellana, Y. Hu, C. D. Jones, Y.
Liu, D. Y. Chiang, J. Liu, and J. F. Prins. “FDM:
A graph-based statistical method to detect dif-ferential
transcription using RNA-seq data,”
Bioinformatics, 2011.
Spero, R., R. Sircar, R. Shubert, R. Taylor II, A.
Wolberg, and R. Superfine. “Nanoparticle diffu-sion
measures bulk clot permeability,” Biophysical
Journal, 2011, vol. 101, no. 4, pp. 943-950.
Stephens, A., J. Haase, L. Vicci, R. Taylor II,
and K. Bloom. “Cohesin, condensin, and the
intramolecular centromere loop together gener-ate
the mitotic chromatin spring,” Journal of Cell
Biolog y, 2011, vol. 193, no. 7, pp. 1167-1180.
Talib, H., M. Peterhans, J. García, M. Styner,
and M. A. González Ballester. “Information
filtering for ultrasound-based real-time registra-tion,”
IEEE Transactions on Bio-medical Engineer-ing,
vol. 58, no. 3, Mar. 2011, pp. 531-540.
Tang, M. D. Manocha, S.-E. Yoon, P. Du, J.-P.
Heo, and R.-F. Tong. “VolCCD: fast continuous
collision culling between deforming volume
meshes,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2011.
van den Berg, J., S. Patil, and R. Alterovitz.
“Motion planning under uncertainty using dif-ferential
dynamic programming in belief space,”
Proc. of the International Symposium on Robotics Re-search
(ISRR), Aug. 2011.
Wilkie, D., J. van den Berg, M. C. Lin, and D.
Manocha. “Self-aware traffic route planning,”
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI),
2011, pp. 1521-1527.
Ye, G., and R. Alterovitz. “Demonstration-guided
motion planning,” Proc. of the International Symposium
on Robotics Research (ISRR), Aug. 2011.
Non Profit Org
US Postage
PAID
Permit 177
department of computer science Chapel Hill NC
college of arts & sciences
The University of North Carolina
cb# 3175, BROO KS COMPUTER SCIENCE
BUILDING
Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3175
editor
Kelli Gaskill
gaskill@cs.unc.edu
General Information
voice: (919) 962-1700
FAX: (919) 962-1799
E-mail: info@cs.unc.edu
web: www.cs.unc.edu
Address corrections, submissions, and for
information about our publications:
pubs@cs.unc.edu
UNC is an Equal Opportunity/
Afirmative Action Institution
Let us know where you are and
what you are doing so that we can
include you in our next issue! Send
us information via e-mail to pubs@
cs.unc.edu; fax it to (919) 962-1799;
or mail it to the address above, c/o
News & Notes. If you fax or mail
your information, please include your
e-mail address.
Throughout News & Notes, we list
degree information for all our B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D. Computer Science
and Math Sciences alumni.
News Notes
Accounting Manager Catherine Perry celebrated 35 years of continuous state service on
August 31, 2011. All but two of those years have been in the Department of Computer
Science. Catherine joined the department as a secretary in August 1978. Prior to joining
the department, she worked for two years as a tape librarian in the Computation Center
in Phillips Hall.